


Flight of Icarus

by ActionAddiction



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: AU, Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance, Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 22:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6490600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActionAddiction/pseuds/ActionAddiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the slums of Satellite District, the only currency that matters is how well you can take a punch. A story of fighting, in every sense of the word.  </p>
<p>Or: What if it was Charles who left instead instead of Erik.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flight of Icarus

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on the universe established in the series Yu-Gi-Oh! - 5Ds, but no prior knowledge is required.

Erik Lehnsherr feels the third punch land on his nose solidly enough that he thinks he’s done for. His vision pops and cracks like his old television signal (back when he used to have a television) before threatening to black out completely. He stumbles backwards a few paces before lurching forward, rage burning through his blood as he reaches for his opponent’s throat. He’s told later that Logan had to force his way through the dispersing crowd in order to haul Erik off the limp body that they later left leaking blood in the street. 

Erik is a fighter. A brawler. He’s used to coming home covered in cuts and scratches, fresh pulpy bruises blossoming over his eyelids. But that never matters to him. He just patches himself up, and sends himself right back out, because what else could he do? 

At night, once the real fights are over and squabbles begin to break out one the sides of streets lining the rows of apartment complex, Erik sometimes looks across the water at New Domino City. He can see the city lights, peaking out of the smog that surrounds Satellite District. Below the nuclear sky and smog and the polluted water the separated the island of Satellite from the mainland, a pipeline runs, the only link connecting the two disparate worlds. Erik has never seen the pipe himself, has only ever heard stories of it, told as he and the other grunts shovel the piles of garbage into the incinerator. 

No, the only proof any of them have of the Pipeline is the tons of waste it spits on the shores of Satellite before the sun even rises. By the time they get to work in the morning, the stench of rot and death already hangs heavy in the air. 

“How’d it go last night?” Alex Summers eyes Erik’s bruised nose. Erik wipes at it, annoyed. 

“Fine.” Dried blood comes away on his hand. It’s felt tender ever since Erik had to set it back into place himself the night before. 

“You win?” 

“Of course.” Erik grunts, readjusting his grip on the shovel. 

Alex lets out a disbelieving laugh. “I don’t know how you do it, man. Night after night.” 

“A guy’s gotta eat. And besides, I have to feed your scrawny ass.” Neither man hears Logan come up behind them. He raises one eyebrow when he sees that Alex and Erik are both leaning on their shovels. Alex rolls his eyes, and the three continue to dig themselves out of the sewage. “But I would be careful, if I was you,” Logan continues. “You - shut the fuck up, Summers, don’t roll your eyes at me,” Alex holds up his hands in indignation. “I’m being serious. They might come looking for you. It’s right around that time of year, start of the fighting season. All those rich Domino sponsors are going to be sniffing around here any day now, looking for new men to throw in the ring.”

“It would be worth it to get out of here,” Erik grumbles, but the other two know he doesn’t mean it. Everyone’s looking for a way out, but not like that. 

Peering out towards where the garbage meets the sea, Erik squints into the unforgiving sun. He knows that logically, the Pipeline must be there, transporting all the waste from pristine New Domino to the slums of Satellite. When he was younger, Erik used to dream of escaping through there, in the dead of night, as so many others tried to do at the time. 

But that was before Sector Security took to guarding the shoreline every night. It was also before Sean Cassidy, and the Summers brothers, Alex and Scott. It wasn’t before Logan, of course, but it was before Erik had any kind of real responsibility, back when he was young and reckless. It was before the thought of escaping through the Pipeline became less like the plans he and Logan used to draw up in their one room apartment and more like a fantasy. 

Erik creeps through the streets that night on edge. He needs a fight, badly. He jumps into the closest ring he can find. People are already placing bets on the two men, no, boys clawing at each other in the dirt. The fight is drawing to an end as one boy scrapes the other boy’s face across the rocks. Erik can already see the money beginning to change hands all around him. Somewhere behind him, he knows that Logan is already starting to place bets, although Erik isn’t planning on challenging anyone for another few rounds. He’ll wait until the men get bigger, the fights get dirtier, and the crumpled five dollar bills handed back and forth become twenties. 

Without warning, and hand reaches into the circle of legs and yanks back the arm of the boy still pummeling his opponent. Erik can already feel Logan’s eyes on him as he tenses. “Easy, son,” the man laughs. “You’re going to kill him.” 

“Erik,” Logan says warningly. The man isn’t dressed in the stained work clothes of Satellite. He’s instead wearing a navy blue suit. Although outfit is fairly understated, it doesn’t quite blend in well enough, and Erik takes notice. 

“Alright, folks,” the man continues, stepping into the middle of the circle and helping the victor to his feet. “Show’s over. Go find yourselves another fight.”

The crowd begins to disperse, grumbling and cursing and pushing past Erik, who still isn’t moving. “Erik, let’s go.” Logan speaks in a harsh undertone, still watching the way the man in the suit has thrown his arm over the boy. The boy looks wary, but is listening intently to whatever the man has to say. 

“Excuse me sir, do you mind? This young man and I are trying to have a private conversation.” The fighter and the man are staring at Erik. When he simply stares back at them, the man looks expectantly at Logan. 

“Get the fuck off me,” Erik snaps when Logan attempts to subtly drag him away from the confrontation, “I’m going, alright?” 

The two don’t talk much for the rest of the night, not that Logan seems to mind. Erik, meanwhile, is seething that they’re coming almost back empty-handed. They managed to find a few smaller, back alley fights later in the night, but it’s nothing compared to the money the normally come home with. It’s not like the earnings they manage to scrape together every month stretch far enough as it is; they can’t afford to skip nights just because Domino’s widely televised fight season is approaching. Erik angrily tells Logan as much. Logan annoyingly seems to realize Erik is just trying to get a rise out of him, which only manages to deepen Erik’s scowl. 

“They need to eat, you know.” Erik adds, not looking at Logan. “Sean and Scott - they think they can fend for themselves, but they’re just a couple of fucking kids.” 

Logan finally turns to him. “Exactly,” he growls. “And what do you think is going to happen when some sponsor turns up from New Domino and takes an interest in _you_? Alex is going to be able to work soon, he’s been asking about coming out with us some night, but…” Logan trails off with a shrug. 

By the time they reach the apartment, Erik is in a towering temper. He storms through the door ahead of Logan, ignoring the surprised comments from the younger ones questioning his early arrival. Erik can feel Alex’s worry as he attempts to quiet Sean and Scott. 

“What happened?”

“What do you think?” Erik snaps. “There’s fucking sponsors from New Domino crawling the streets.”

“Couldn’t find much work.” Logan adds. A little unnecessarily, Erik thinks. It was implied. 

Alex sees his opportunity and Erik narrows his eyes, daring him to take it. He know it’s been coming for some time now. Alex thinks he’s being subtle, pulling Logan aside to ask under his breath if _maybe he and Erik need an extra pair of hands tomorrow night?_ No, Erik knows Alex has tried his damndest to keep his desire unknown until the right time comes. Alex has refrained from asking thus far because he knows what Erik thinks of allowing him into the nightlife of Satellite. “Let me come out with you guys.” 

“To haggle?” Erik presses. 

“No. To fight.”

“Like hell.” Erik’s answer comes out every bit as hard as he wants it to, and Alex refuses to look surprised. Instead, grim determination creases his face, making him appear older. “Scott, Sean. Go to your room.” Erik says calmly. The boys obey, looking back over their shoulder as Logan shoos them into the bedroom. 

As soon as he’s sure the pair are out of earshot, Logan sinks onto the couch that also serves as Erik’s bed and crosses his arms, fully prepared for the imminent fight. One of the many joys of living in a three room apartment with paper thins walls, of course, is that they all know everybody in the entire complex with be able to hear every word. In fact, there will probably have judgemental looks waiting for them when he leaves for work tomorrow morning. 

“Erik,” Alex turns to him, frustrated, and - God he’s grown up so much. “I know how much you guys are pushing to make ends meet. Do you - do you think I don’t notice? Ever since Charles left -”

Erik tenses. _Ever since Charles left_. The words twist a knife already lodged between his ribs. “Charles is gone.” He spits, turning. 

It’s bad enough that they couldn’t afford to move out of their apartment, regardless of how much Erik wanted to. It’s bad enough that the little ones - still baby faced toddlers at the time - had asked over and over where Charles was and when he was coming home. The fact that Erik wakes up every morning with a stiff back from the couch he sleeps on because he can’t stand to be in the bed he and Charles used to share is bad enough. But that’s still not the worst part. 

No, the worst part is needing to pick up extra shifts at the junkyard. The worst part is having to stay out later and later each night, searching for just one last fight so that hopefully there will be food on the table tomorrow night _and_ the month’s rent will be paid. Every day Erik has to stay away from Sean and Alex and Scott because he’s still picking up the pieces of what Charles left behind, he curses the man’s name. 

“I know he is,” Alex winces. “I didn’t mean to...I just know that you and Logan are gone all the time and I...I just think it’s time I helped. ”

Erik slumps down next to Logan, letting his shoulders sag. He doesn’t want a fight, not with Alex. Not tonight. “Just leave it, Summers,” he advises. 

Alex seems to understand, and for once, he lets the subject drop. “It’s late,” he says, quietly. “I’m going to make sure the Rugrats are in bed and then probably pass out myself. Logan?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Logan grumbles, not opening his eyes. If Erik didn’t know better, he would say that Logan has fallen asleep. “I’m coming, just give me a second.”

Alex nods and swiftly leaves the room, closing the bedroom door behind him. 

Erik lets out a breath he doesn’t know he’s holding. “Shit,” he groans.

“You’re not going to be able to tell him ‘no’ much longer. You’re running out of excuses”

“I know, I know.” Erik waves his hand in a halfhearted gesture. 

Logan stands, stretching. “You can’t protect them forever, Erik.” 

“I know.” 

God, Erik hates Logan sometimes. He hates that Logan has the ability to level him with that steady gaze of his. Sometimes it feels as if Logan has known him forever with the way he always seems to know what’s going through Erik’s head. And in a way, he has. Logan has known Erik since the latter was a teenager sneaking into bars to start fights just to break a couple noses. Back then, Erik had no one, and he still sometimes longs for the days when he didn’t have to look out for anyone but himself. 

Back then, he was angry. He wanted to make the world pay for the shitty hand it had dealt him, leaving him without a mother or father whose name he knew. While there’s no shortage of dirty, backstreet and underground bars in Satellite, Erik had the misfortune of attracting the wrong sort of attention. If Logan hadn’t recognized him, bloodied and limping through the street, Erik might not have made it home. As it was, he wasn’t looking for assistance of any kind. 

“Just leave me alone,” he’d snarled as Logan wordlessly handed over a fistfull of slightly used papertowels outside a bar the bar he’d just walked out of. “What do you want?” 

“I just figured you could use some help,” Logan shrugged. Erik narrowed his eyes, looking for some kind of ulterior motive. 

He’s been looking for almost a decade, and still hasn’t been able to find one. 

At Logan’s suggestion, Erik had begun to take up semi professional fighting. At first, Erik was sceptical, but in a few weeks, the two adopted the mutually beneficial system used by fighters and their partners across Satellite. Erik and Logan would each contribute a few hundred dollars to their nightly bid, before venturing into Satellite's flourishing underbelly in search of a fight. As Erik fought, Logan would work the circle of spectators, placing bets on Erik’s victory. It was both simple and surprisingly effective. 

After a while, it only made sense that they moved in together, for logistical reasons of course. Erik found that he actually enjoyed living with another person, just a little. He and Logan had to share a bed, but after spending an entire lifetime alone, the company was not entirely unwelcome. 

And then there was Charles. Erik had never met anyone like him in Satellite, and he’s pretty sure he never will again. Charles worked with a tireless energy that seemed completely foreign compared to the junkyard workers with downcast dead eyes that walked with a permanent bend in their spines. 

As Erik tries to fall asleep, snatches of conversation between he and Charles flit through his head. Charles’ chipper hello when Erik walked through the door in the evening. Charles trying to defend some horrific recipe he concocted from the spoiled leftover in the fridge. Charles drinking both Erik and Logan under a table, only to start an argument with the fighter sitting next to him, landing him several broken knuckles and a swollen face. Charles was a schemer, not a fighter. He could talk shit with the best of them, but when it came time to actually defend himself, well. As Charles would say, it wasn’t exactly his forte. 

The thoughts are unwelcome. As Alex had said so bluntly, Charles was gone. He wasn’t coming back.

_He doesn’t want to come back_. A tiny voice whispers traitorously in Erik's ear. _He chose to leave you_. 

But it’s true. And besides, Erik and Logan and Alex don’t want him back. The younger ones do, but one day they will understand. In life, there are only a handful of people you can count on, and they are few and far between. The rest will leave. 

Erik hopes as he drifts off to sleep that the entire train of thought will be forgotten by the time he wakes up. 

It isn’t. 

The memories put him on edge all day. By the end of his double shift at the junkyard, Erik is exhausted, although he attempts to conceal it. But Erik is tired enough that he allows Logan to convince him to take an hour or two of rest before going out of the night. Which, coincidentally, is how Erik walks through his front door to find Sean and Scott jumping up and down on the couch. 

He catches one around the waist, then the other. “Knock it off, guys, come on.”

Logan cracks a smile at his distress. “Yeah, the couch is already lumpy enough as it is.”

“Where’s Alex?” He asks, annoyed. “Sean?”

Sean reaches around Erik’s back to poke the other boy hard in the back of the head. “Left.” 

“Hey, don’t do that to - what do you mean he left? Left where?”

Alex is apparently out there, somewhere in the city. There’s cooling plates of dinner on the table, presumably so Sean and Scott don’t starve, but no other trace that Alex came home that night. As worry begins to set in, Erik is sharply reminded of the way Alex and Scott looked when they first came to live with them. Of course it was Charles who found the boys. He was the only one home at the time, and the pair had mistakenly knocked on the door. Scott was little more than a baby at the time, crying as Alex held him a little lopsidedly. Ever since they could afford it, Erik, Charles, and Logan had been living in the nicer parts of Satellite. While Erik has seen true poverty and violence growing up, it hurt to see it so clearly in the eyes of another little boy. 

Three days later, no living relatives could be located. In fact, no one came forward about the children at all, which, unfortunately was not particularly unusual. Alex claimed he was searching for his Aunt by going from door to door in what he thought was her neighborhood, but by all accounts, she did not exist. 

Erik was ready to send Alex Summers and his little brother Scott into whatever unfunded government program took legal guardianship for abandoned children until they reached legal age when he said fuck it, he could do a better job, couldn’t he?

That was the idea anyway. 

“You check the Northern and Eastern sectors, I’ll check the Southern and the Western.” Erik says hurriedly to Logan, already halfway between knocking on their neighbor’s door to ask if she can watch Sean and Scott and mentally mapping out everywhere in the city Alex could be. All the people that could have him even now, at this very moment. 

“Erik?”

“Do you think someone took him? 

“Erik, I-”

“His parents, maybe? That haven’t shown up yet, but it’s possible.” He refuses to consider more sinister options: Sector Security, sponsors, traffickers...

“Erik!” 

Erik spins to face him. “ _What?_ ”

“I know where Alex is.” 

Logan tries to explain it to him. How he suspects that Alex has been sneaking out nightly for the better part of a month to fight in the novice rings, hoping to get his start the same way Erik did. “When I confronted him, he promised me that he would at least try to ask you about going. I wanted you to find out from him, not like this.”

Heat is creeping up under Erik’s collar. Their two bedroom apartment suddenly seems far too small. “I told him no.”

“He’s older than you were when you started.”

And that was how Erik found himself pushing through crowds and rings of patrons in parts of the city he hasn’t been to it years. 

He finds Alex at one of the last places he thinks to check. While he himself has never fought by the short stretch of coastline reserved for fishing, he knows that bodies are occasionally found dragged twenty or thirty feet out to sea. The water is so polluted that the fish almost never come out of the water edible; most inhabitants of the district practically grew up on the stuff. The stench of the discarded innards of marine life decaying on the beach recalls the metallic taste to Erik’s mouth. A little downshore, past the shelter of rusting, a group of boys is kicking something towards the rancid water. 

“Hey!” Erik shouts, as soon as it’s obvious that the lump is not a lump, and instead has the characteristics of a cowering body. 

He expects, naturally, that the attackers will scatter as soon as they notice him, but instead a few laugh, and one delivers a vicious kick into the soft stomach of their victim. 

With sickening realization, Erik recognizes the curve of Alex’s profile. Without thinking, he dives towards Alex, shielding both their heads in anticipation of the blows he knows will begin raining down any second.


End file.
